McKinsey is the world’s most distinguished firm of management consultants. It helps organisations across the private, public, and social sectors create ‘the change that matters’. McKinsey has always helped its clients identify and set their direction. But in the last few years, it has gone further: it now works together with clients to turn these ambitious goals into reality. In fact, over half of the work McKinsey does for clients now is in areas that didn’t exist as little as five years ago. McKinsey therefore wanted to update its visual identity to express this new level of impact.

Visualising partnership

We started with the thought that’s always been central to McKinsey: partnership, not just within the firm, but between the firm and its clients. We evolved the famous McKinsey logo to give it a more modern character. With typographer Radim Pesko, we created an authoritative new typeface, Bower, named after the pioneering McKinsey partner Marvin Bower. We introduced an animation, the ‘Partnership Mark’, to symbolise the agile ways McKinsey’s teams work together and with clients. We designed a system to help McKinsey visualise complex data, and we created a new photographic style. The core of the identity remains blue, but a new ‘McKinsey deep blue’, contrasted against a clean white, helping to cut through the visual noise we all interact with every day.

A new presence

The new identity was launched globally from February 2019 onwards, and is already helping evolve McKinsey’s presence, both in the client world and in the talent marketplace.